Sylvia Burgos Toftness

When MC and essayist Dessa was so little that she was still called Margret Wander, her mom taught her how to farm. She says she hated picking green beans, but loved planting corn and eating borage. She even dyed fabric in beet juice to make quilts at her mom’s behest. “She definitely had a vision,” Dessa says. These days, when Sylvia Burgos Toftness isn’t farming Bull Brook Keep, a Clear Lake, Wisconsin, cattle farm she’s owned with her husband since 2009, she’s co-hosting radio show and podcast Deep Roots Radio. We found her in La Crosse, Wisconsin, at the country’s largest organic farming conference, MOSES (she’s the president), and talked about her midlife move to farming and the organic charge she leads.

The MOSES conference has everyone from Mennonites to hippies to queer farmers to Make America Great Again hats. What is the shared value here?

That to farm well [is] to farm in a way that’s sustainable. And by sustainable I mean that you have to understand that your food is only as good as your soil is. And your soil depends on your understanding what soil is, and managing your farming in ways that not only protect the soil and protect the water but regenerate the soil. Because I’m a beef farmer, if my grass has high nutrition my cows will thrive. They’ll also be contented. And their beef will be better.

Who are your customers?

Many of my younger customers are concerned about their children in a large way. And so where they may not have decided to make this kind of a purchase in the past, as soon as they have a child in their life, they make that decision.

Are we finally seeing a meaningful shift from cheap food to quality food?

The American paradigm for three generations was cheap food and plenty of it. So because the price point was what was driving the market, then if you’re a producer or a processor, you do whatever you can to produce cheap food. In this community, the drive is nutrient-dense, high-quality food, grown in a way that profits the health of the soil and the farm, and the livestock, and the farm family, and all of the customers. [We’re] committed to a transparent farm. In other words, people can come in and take a look in whatever room they choose. We do transparent farming with a tiny carbon hoofprint. Because of that, our customers can eat with a tiny carbon hoofprint.

You didn’t buy your farm until you were 59. Was farming in your family history?

I was born and raised in the Bronx. My parents were born and raised in Manhattan. The thing that kind of pulled me into thinking about living on a farm was having the very good fortune of spending all of my summers on Staten Island, because my grandparents bought into a Hispanic collective that owned land on shorefront there.

Did you spend a lot of time out there?

I got to spend all summer long there. And it was at that time, in the ’50s and ’60s, Staten Island was not connected to the rest of New York. Because there was no Verrazano-Narrows Bridge until 1964. It was totally rural. It was little farms. I would spend my winters in the Bronx, in the tenements of the Bronx, and my summers there. This is where I breathed.

So this has always been in you?

Absolutely. I was subscribing to Organic Gardening magazine when I was in my 20s. But the connection to food, that really happened when Dessa—Maggie—and Max were little kids. I grew an organic garden in Minneapolis.

You spent 30 years in PR before farming. That’s a major midlife change.

YES! My husband is a chiropractor. One day he goes, “I think we need to get off the lake and buy a farm.” The kids aren’t here anymore, they’re not using the lake. We were in Amery, Wisconsin, but we wanted to stay in that community. Because we had a very firm church family.

So this farming thing was your crusade?

Yeah, he was totally supportive, totally supportive, but even he wondered, “Is this really going to happen?” Because his experience in the community was that cattle farmers were going out of business. So he says, “How are you gonna succeed, when all these guys who really have been knowing what they’re doing are having such a tough time?” So, he was pretty much like “prove it to me.” I went to grazing schools, and I went to Missouri, and I went this way and that way, and getting as much information as I could, and reading. But you have to be on the farm and see what’s going on, and talk to farmers who’ve done it for a zillion years.

You either have to do your homework or go to the farm.

And I was trying to get as much in as possible at an age when most people are retired. And so we knew even entering into it, we knew that our window was small and closing. We had a hard time finding a farm, until one of my husband’s good friends came to us and said, “I’d like you to buy the farm right next to me.” It was part of an estate and he says, “I’d rather have you as my neighbor.” So we acquired 72 acres that way.

So how did it go from “I’m going to go buy a farm” to “I’m going to become a leader in the organic farming community”?

(Laughs.) How did all that happen? Well, I think it’s through some of the history and connections. So you have to think about my career: public relations. In public relations, you try to help people understand a story. And you try to provide them information so they can make their own choices.

Have you seen huge growth with organic farming?

Oh yeah, it’s amazing, and it really does parallel the upswing in demand. The growth in the production has been double digit almost every single year since 1990.